The present invention relates generally to the field of application pattern deployment for information technology (IT) landscapes, and more particularly to application patterns for IT landscapes that include applications, databases, and servers.
An application pattern is a template or blueprint of a complex setup of IT resources. Application patterns focus on the provisioning of servers, operating systems, etc. in order to create the application landscape itself. For example, some application patterns describe web portal environments. There are systems available that are able to instantiate running environments based on application patterns. Instantiation in this context refers to the provisioning and configuration of an application pattern. A single application pattern can be instantiated multiple times. The result of each instantiation process is a pattern instance, which includes a pattern description.
Application patterns often require integration with other application patterns. An example is hosting or production environments in which application landscapes (i.e. patterns) frequently require integration into system management infrastructures, which can also be thought of as application patterns. To complicate matters, system management infrastructures vary considerably depending on the provider and their details are typically unknown to the authors of application patterns requiring integration. In addition, multiple diverse application patterns will often share the same systems management infrastructure. It is an ongoing challenge to integrate system management topologies into various application patterns. Typically, such integrations would require modification of the application pattern, the system management infrastructure, or both. If one considers just the common cases where multiple application patterns require integration with a given system management infrastructure, incorporation of the same system management topology into multiple application patterns would be required. In other words, multiple instantiations of the same system management topology into the application patterns would be necessary.